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It’s a conundrum that plagues any education minister during a teacher strike.

When is a student’s education in jeopardy?

How many days can kids be out of school before their year is at risk?

Education Minister Liz Sandals asked the Education Relations Commission (ERC) to rule on it last Friday.

If the ERC says the year’s in jeopardy, the government could decide to bring in back-to-work legislation to the legislature — and turn the whole contentious bundle of blackboard chalk over to binding arbitration to settle.

High school students in Peel, Durham and the Rainbow board in Sudbury have been out of their classrooms for three weeks. The Ontario Secondary School Teachers’ Federation (OSSTF) announced recently that students in Ottawa-Carleton could join them Thursday.

This is all one big, fat bureaucratic discussion about nothing if you’re a high school student.

It’s the middle of May.

It doesn’t really matter what grade you’re in — your year’s done and you’ve missed out on vital parts of your education.

While a lot has been made of students who are bound for university or college, those are probably not the students who are at greatest risk.

Arrangements can and have been made for them to get their marks. Those who are on the university track will find success no matter what.

The bigger problem are those children who need a little help.

Kids who aren’t engaged with the school system, who may be borderline, often give up hope when a teacher strike happens. They get turned off school forever. And if this strike isn’t resolved, there won’t be summer school to help them catch up.

Teachers’ unions send mixed messages. They’ll tell you how important teachers are in the lives of their students. They’ll tell you how every day they provide a new and vital piece of schooling to their students. That’s all true.

So how then can their unions suggest, after 15, 20 — or however many days they’re out of the classroom, a student’s school year is not at risk?

The Ontario Labour Relations Board (OLRB) and the ERC are expected to release rulings imminently on the strike.

The OLRB will rule on its legality. The ERC will judge its impact on students. Don’t hold your breath for them to send teachers back to their classrooms. Since the ERC was created in 1975, it has given only 12 jeopardy rulings. One work-to-rule protest lasted 57 days and one full strike 26 days.

The way forward is NOT to ban teacher strikes.

Teachers are not an emergency service. If we outlaw strikes, their disputes will go to binding arbitration — and the track record is that arbitrators give away the store with huge pay hikes.

The way forward is to deal honestly and openly with teachers and to end this cumbersome and unwieldy two-tier system of bargaining the government created.

You can understand why teachers are angry. Their unions donated large sums of money to Working Families, the coalition that spent millions in third-party advertising over the last four elections to ensure the PC Party didn’t win.

Teacher unions, having contributed just last year to the re-election of Premier Kathleen Wynne and her government, now feel it’s payback time.

It’s time to ban contributions by public sector unions for third-party advertising by groups like Working Families. There’s an obvious conflict when the people paying for the advertising will be sitting across the negotiating table with their hands out for a pay hike after the vote.

While it’s easy to wrangle over who’s to blame in this strike — teachers or government — let’s remember the really important people in this are the students.